Israel has turned to India and Sri Lanka to urgently fill around 30,000 vacancies in its construction industry, after the country deported thousands of Palestinian workers following the October 7 Hamas attack, Israeli officials and the media said yesterday.
The Israel Builders’ Association (IBA) said that its representatives will be in India and Sri Lanka next week to screen applicants for various roles such as plastering, ceramic tiling, building work and iron bending. This is in addition to the agreement Sri Lanka signed with Israel last month to allow the immediate hiring of 10,000 farm workers.
The building industry, one of the country’s biggest economic sectors with a market size valued at US$ 71 billion in 2022, has been operating at just 15 percent of its pre-war capacity. Around 82,000 Palestinians worked in the country’s construction industry prior to the assault, accounting for a third of the sector’s workforce.
“The goal is bringing 10,000 workers very quickly to Israel because time is running out and we are already facing a big problem financially,” said, IBA’s Deputy Director General Shay Pauzner. The Israeli construction industry needs an estimated 100,000 workers to return to its pre-war capacity.
These workers are likely to arrive in Israel by the end of next month. They will be part of a batch of 30,000 new workers that the Israeli Government has allowed the IBA to recruit from different countries including Sri Lanka and India.
The Times of Israel reported on December 20 that the authorities announced the arrival of more than 12,000 new and veteran foreign workers.
This includes more than 1,000 Thai and 100 Sri Lankan workers for the agricultural sector.
The recruitment in Sri Lanka is at an advanced stage and the Foreign Employment Ministry said about 100 people had already left for Israel and at least 10,000 would be recruited in all in the short term.
Labour and Foreign Employment Minister Manusha Nanayakkara and Sri Lanka’s Ambassador to Israel Nimal Bandara have been working tirelessly with the Israeli Government to fulfill Israel’s manpower needs in several crucial sectors.
On December 19, during a telephone conversation with his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also “discussed advancing the arrival of foreign workers from India to the State of Israel”.
Israel is facing a severe crunch of labourers and caregivers after the Hamas attack of October 7 that triggered the ongoing conflict in Gaza Strip.
Many Thai and Filipino workers have fled while Palestinian workers have been barred from entering Israel after the Hamas massacre. Tel Aviv is also apparently not keen to recruit more workers from Morocco and China. Agencies have also reported that a team of Israeli recruiters will hold recruitment camps in New Delhi and Chennai from December 27 for the next 10 days to be followed by similar sessions in Sri Lanka. About 18,000 Indians and 8,000 Sri Lankans are working in Israel, mostly as caregivers. Two Sri Lankan caregivers perished in the brutal Hamas attacks.
